A.I. " Buzz" Bezzerides (August 9, 1908 – January 1, 2007) was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing noir and action motion pictures, especially several of Warners' "social conscience" films of the 1940s.

Bezzerides' most famous script was Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which was a masterful film noir and influenced many directors in France shortly after its release. Bezzerides transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make "the great whatsit" the Pandora's Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: "People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, "You don't taste like anybody I know." I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun."[1]

The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. Bezzerides also worked alongside William Faulkner and befriended him. Also, Bezzerides, who at the time was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, later wrote: "I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract ... Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world."